Home › Authors › Janet Suzman
Janet Suzman Quotes
born 1939 United Kingdom
Dame Janet Suzman (born 9 February 1939) is a South African-born British actress who had a successful early career in the Royal Shakespeare Company, later replaying many Shakespearean roles on television. In her first film, Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), her performance as Empress Alexandra Feodorovna earned her several honours, including a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Random Janet Suzman quote
12 quotes
Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It's in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare.
Nature has a way of dealing with your brain when you have a child – it turns it to porridge.
The apartheid government was frightened of ridicule. Everyone is frightened of laughter.
I remember being absolutely shocked in Australia at the absence of black people.
Life and art get mixed up sometimes – it's what actors draw on.
You can't envy something you can't be, can you? You sat and admired what was emerging.
Any government would be really embarrassed to ban Shakespeare.
I stepped back from acting because I was bringing up a child. You can't do both.
My sensitivity to prejudice is high because I was brought up in South Africa. My awareness of all this crap came earlier, and it's stayed with me, and it's why I'm militantly liberal.
You realise retrospectively mother nature has made you absolutely focused and cow-like. Then you realise your child is infinitely cleverer than you will ever be, and wittier and funnier, and you like being in its company and so you think, 'I haven't done a bad job, really.
In South Africa we were criminal, beastly, vile and disgusting, but we didn't commit genocide.
The whole purpose of an actor's life is to find great writing, and when it comes along you leap on it like a puppy on a slipper. You're avid – greedy – hungry – for great gobbets of good writing. That's all we live for.
Topics Janet Suzman is quoted on